, has been teaching Indian cooking for over a decade. She was inspired by her vegan daughter, Ratika, to create delicious, compassionate recipes that taste just as good (or even better) than their dairy-laden counterparts!

The mother-daughter team invented a homemade creamy cashew cheese that smells and tastes absolutely gorgeous, especially on Kirti's famous baked dishes which she will demonstrate at this mouth-watering workshop.

VSS had a talk earlier this year at Tampines Regional Library by Dr Sanjay Doshi. The Library staff found it to be quite successful and invited VSS to do another talk. This one, on Sun, 5 Dec, 2pm-3.30pm, at the library’s Changi-Simei Room, will be presented by VSS Exco member Mr Douglas Teo, a TCM physician.

The title of Douglas’ talk is Steps in Becoming Vegetarian. The talk will be in Mandarin.

After another scientific report showed meat to be an inefficient way to get our food and that this inefficiency wreaks havoc on our environment, a VSS Exco member published a letter on the topic in TODAY newspaper.

I refer to “One Singapore resident's ecological footprint equals that of 33 Africans” (Oct 14). We could significantly reduce Singapore’s ecological footprint by reducing our meat consumption. To put it simply, eating meat is wasting food; we have to feed many kgs of plant food to the pigs, chickens and cows to yield just 1 kg of meat. As the WWF report states on p. 87, “Conversion of vegetable-based calories to animal-based calories is inefficient”.

Fortunately, many people are already reducing meat consumption for health reasons, and others are cutting back on meat to show concern for the animals who live cruel, very brief lives as part of the meat industry. WWF’s expose of the environmental consequences of meat consumption is indeed timely. Add that to the UN’s paper, ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, which claims that 18% of human produced global warming gasses are linked to livestock, and we have further confirmation that eating less meat is the green thing to do. Readers may wish to join with 25 local NGOs, including many in the environment sector, who have endorsed the Veggie Thursday project: www.veggiethursday.sg, which encourages people to go veggie every Thursday or any other day that fits their schedules.

On Sun, 21 Nov, 2-9pm, join us at Singapost Auditorium (L5, SingPost Bldg, near Paya Lebar MRT) as VSS Education and Outreach Officer, Mr Loh Yeow Nguan, joins international experts to share practices of holistic solutions to treat modern-day diseases and protect the environment. Over six overseas holistic medical specialists and seven local experts will gather at this dual-language symposium to share their medical knowledge with the public.

Plus, on Fri, 5 Nov, 9:30am~5:30pm, Kampung Senang will be hosting a ONE-DAY Express Organic Culinary Workshop to be taught be Chef Oh Chong Fah. Learn a complete wholesome diet for people who take responsibility for their health. This workshop includes materials, hands on session and food appreciation.

Halimah Arivalaki Ilavarasi is a person of many talents: an editor at VegVibe magazine, a geography teacher, a speaker on veg topics and a blogger on veg cooking, just to mention a few.

Now, Halimah is taking veg to a place it’s never been before: to Robinsons in the heart of Orchard Road. Specifically, she is doing a cookery class on the 5th floor of Robinson Department store next to where they keep their household items and cutlery. It's called the Robinson-Wiltshire baking studio.

This is unlike most cooking classes. Most classes are demo classes where participants observe the chef preparing food. Here, they get to do it hands-on; that means they bake and decorate their own cakes, cook their own meals and they get to bring all of it back home as well. On top of that, there will be a goodie bag given to all participants. Light refreshments will be served.

Adeline Tan is a young entrepreneur who has been helping to promote Veggie Thursday (see above photo of Adeline at the VT booth at the 10 10 10 event).

Adeline’s new company, LINS' Smoodees, specializes in green smoothies, a surprisingly tasty way for people to get their greens. You can try her green creations at Loewen Gardens Farmers’ Market, 75E Loewen Road (near Dempsey Rd), on Sat, 6 Nov, 8.30am-2pm. To learn more: http://www.facebook.com/linssmoodees

Gowri is a local teacher and vegetarian who brings in eco-friendly and vegetarian candles. There is even one collection that won a UNESCO award (a banana leaf inspired design with green tea scent). Candles are made with high quality and gentle ingredients with love and care for the environment. To learn more about the health and earth-friendly candle gifts without hazardous effects of paraffin and other harmful chemicals, log on to:http://www.lightsofbliss.com

One of the landmark veg books of the past couple years is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safron Foer. The book details the horrors we inflict on our fellow animals due to our self-defeating urge to eat meat. The author employed two fact checkers to enhance the reliability of the book.

Eating Animals has been a big seller and Safron Foer has appeared frequently in the media. One indication of the book’s reach is that after attending last month’s IVU World Vegetarian Congress in Jakarta, a VSS member tried to buy a copy at a bookshop at Jakarta airport, but it was sold out. Better get your own copy soon!

Recently, a reader suggested we reprint an article from the Care2 website - http://www.care2.com - that lists responses to frequently heard argument against being veg. Below is the first one. Here’s hoping that all your arguments are friendly ones.

ARGUMENT #1: If we didn't eat animals, they would quickly overpopulate the planet and most likely starve to death.

The population of domesticated farm animals in the USA in 2008 is estimated roughly at around 20 billion. This figure is quite small since the actual number of animals slaughtered for food for the US was 10,270,019,000 (that's: ten billion, two hundred seventy million, nineteen thousand animals). What this means is farm animals outnumber human beings by a 65 to 1 ratio in the USA.

As it may appear from these statistics, non-human animal populations seem to already be vastly out of control. You might think that to kill these animals would be the best solution since they are already consuming 80% of our corn grown in this country and 60 billion pounds of our soy each year, but unfortunately no matter how many animals Americans kill and eat each year, there continues to be more of them.

The reason for this is quite simple. Animal farmers have intensive breeding operations where they artificially inseminate as many female animals as possible to create even more offspring than the year before. Without giant egg hatcheries and other artificial forms of breeding, animals would never have any hope of reaching, let alone sustaining, current populations.

As far as animals suffering from starvation due to over population goes, the amount of grains and other crops consumed by US livestock is enough to feed 800 million human (animals) who are currently starving to death worldwide.

The argument against a vegan lifestyle stated above could also be reworded to read as "But if we didn't slit the throats of animals and eat their flesh, they might die horrible deaths."